What’s little known to anyone following recent news about the war in Syria is that an 18,300 sq. km. region in the northwest of the country — the western Kurdish Rojava cantons, which include the ISIS-contested city of Kobane — has been the site of a social experiment grounded in eco-anarchist Bookchin’s ideas of revolutionary “social ecology” and “libertarian municipalism,” which Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan has rebranded “democratic confederalism.”

As Irish anarchist Andrew Flood describes it, the Rojavan revolutionaries aim for nothing less than

“the development of ‘democratic, ecological, gender liberated society’ in the shell of the existing society through co-operation between a political party taking power in elections (the BDP) and a parallel system of neighboorhood councils which would be really making the decisions. All this as part of an overall body called the Democratic Society Congress bringing together political parties, councils and civil society.”

Writing in ROARMag, Rafael Taylor details the connections between Bookchin’s thought and that of Öcalan, who co-founded the PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) and began to read Bookchin while in a Turkish jail cell in the early 2000s. With his democratic confederalism, Öcalan explicitly aims to replace capitalist modernity’s “three basic elements: capitalism, the nation-state, and industrialism” with a “democratic nation, communal economy, and ecological industry.” In practice, this has included a bottom-up form of organization featuring local decision-making assemblies with a 40% gender (women’s) quota, popular “academies,” and “peace villages,” including the Van “ecological women’s village.”

In Happidrome: Hierarchy in the UK, Anarchism in Kurdistan, the BBC’s Adam Curtis contextualizes the Bookchin-Öcalan connection in the debate over Bookchin’s own eco-utopianism. The post features fascinating clips from a late 1960s documentary on utopia called Towards Tomorrow, which pits the technotopian thinkers Herman Kahn and B. F. Skinner against the eco-decentralist (and Bookchin inspiration) Lewis Mumford.

5 Responses

Oh man, don’t let Graeber know you’ve called him an “anarchist anthropologist”! He gets very snippy about that… 🙂

Fascinating stuff, though! It’s a great experiment and interesting that they’re on the front lines against ISIS, but receiving little attention from the media. Any sense of the ecological dimensions of their work, given it’s Bookchin inspiration?

Hi Jeremy – I don’t know of any details about the ecological piece, beyond what’s in the articles (linked above). There may be more here. I’ll ask my friend and colleague Brian Tokar (of the Institute for Social Ecology and UVM) if he knows anything more… Janet Biehl has written about her impressions on her blog Ecology or Catastrophe, but they are a few months old.

[…] York Times Magazine article on “The Rojava Experiment” finally gives mainstream recognition to what has been happening among the Kurds of northern Syria. As he writes, “In accordance with a philosophy laid out by a […]